One thing about the Enron collapse --- it's certainly shining light on
the character of some of the principals.

Jeff Skilling, "savvy and detail-oriented" when running Enron, was
forgetful
and ignorant before Congress. Ken Lay tried to cancel his
appearance before Congress entirely when it became clear to him that
he'd get tough questions. (How could he ever have doubted it?) Before that, his wife showed up on teevee,
claiming in a well
rehearsed performance that the family was broke, and all their
houses were up for sale to generate a little spare cash. Strangely,
no local real estate agents seem
to know about that.

But then again, we're talking about Enron executives. Their
company is in Chapter 11, and they're traveling to bankruptcy hearings
on
its corporate jets --- which they're still even using on private
business, to go to a funeral. (Those jets are also supposed to be on
the block, but again, they haven't been sold yet. The market for
corporate jets is terrible these days, don't you know.
Terrible).

Nor has the bankruptcy kept them from continuing to pay for their
luxury suites and box seats at the baseball stadium still known as
Enron field. And, in the process, keeping their name on the stadium,
for whatever that's worth --- they payments are part of their naming
rights deal, which the team is desperate to ditch. (It's certainly
not worth much in monetary terms, as the naming rights are not
transferable, and the last thing Enron needs right now is more
publicity).

They built a business on lies, hugely overstating the revenues, and
sweeping hundreds of millions of dollars in debt under the rug in
phony partnership deals --- which were, incidentally, arranged to
divert millions of dollars from Enron's corporate treasury directly
to them. They filled it with high-tech gadgetry and toys and
gadgets which are currently choking Ebay.
Some of it, they didn't even seem to have a use for --- at one point,
secretaries were put behind unstaffed trading desks and told to
look busy as management put on a show for visiting Wall Street analysts.
And when the deals started
to unravel, they dumped stock while telling employees and shareholders
that everything was fine.

You could try to write some of this off as the apotheosis of greed,
or something like that, but that, by itself, doesn't explain the
ludicrous evasions and denials, the obsession with toys --- jets,
baseball suites --- and the flashy arrogance. Where have we seen this
before?

How about Ivy league colleges which seem at times to put an
impregnable barrier between the spawn of the elite and the
consequences of their actions? Like Harvard, for instance, where two
officers of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, an annual drag show that
has been kicking around since before the civil war, are now under
indictment for stealing $100,000 from the organization, having
apparently made little effort to disguise the theft. And Jordana
Lewis, writing in
the Harvard Crimson, thinks it unlikely they thought a year of drugs,
hot parties, and slick clothes were worth another ten in the clink. Quoth she:

The more obvious explanation is an audacious cockiness
that they wouldn't go to jail, that Harvard (or at least the Harvard
name) would bail them out, and that it would all make for an
interesting chapter in their soon-to-be-written tell-all. Most of that
arrogance probably has to do with the mind-boggling breaks we get at
this school. If we don't study for a class, the professor punishes us
with a Gentleman's C. If we are caught drinking underage, the Ad Board
disciplines us with a firmly-stated, flimsily-followed
admonishment. If we rape another student, we are penalized with a one
or two-year vacation from school, subject to review.

Harvard is completely without serious consequences and its students
can do no wrong, or so it seems. Regardless how much students slack,
shirk or steal, the University eventually tosses a diploma in their
direction and they stride into the real world having been coddled by
academics and protected from the harsh realities of the real
world. Sheltered by brick, ivy and egos, we are taught to feel
impervious to everyone else's rules, according to which people go to
jail and ruin their lives for mistakes they made when they were, yes,
just 22.

The overgrown college student theory may seem simplistic, but
it has a few merits; it certainly explains the way the names of the
"partnerships" that Enron executives used to loot the company seem
to have been plucked off the wall of some freshman's dorm room:
JEDI. Raptor. Chewco (from Chewbacca).

If that explanation appeals to you, then you might want to consider
in that light the career of another overgrown collegian. The one
whose father let Ken Lay overnight in the White House, and appointed Lay
to a trusteeship on his presidential library. The one whose own
presidential campaign traveled on Enron's
corporate jets (you know, the ones they haven't sold yet). The
present resident of the White House, George W. Bush.

Dubya's enough in tune with the general fratboy
weltanshauung that he once told
a female Yale graduate that "something had been lost" when the
school, his own alma mater, had begun to admit women. And he
certainly seems into aggressive accounting.

His political party nearly turned Arkansas upside down looking for
shady deals by Clinton's former associates --- the theory apparently
being that those would somehow shed light on Clinton's own character.
Perhaps there was something to that...

For the second time in five days, the Boston Archdiocese late yesterday announced it had discovered more allegations of sexual abuse of children by active clergymen, and removed six additional priests from their assignments.

Last month, Cardinal Bernard Law twice assured the public that the archdiocese had removed all priests known to have sexually molested minors from any assignments.

In addition, of the six priests ousted from their positions yesterday, the Globe has learned that at least four had previous sexual abuse claims against them settled by the archdiocese.

Thursday, February 07, 2002

I thought Bush's policy on Executive Privilege was simple and
straightforward: stuff that makes the administration look good gets
maximum publicity, and stuff that makes the administration look bad is
covered by executive privilege.

For instance, last summer, the Bush White House declassified and
released carefully edited transcripts of private conversations between
Clinton and Barak concerning Mark Rich. But when Clinton's former
counsel sought to have the entire conversation about Rich
placed on the public record, the Dubya drones declined that request:
the stuff that might make Clinton look good is still classified.

Wednesday, February 06, 2002

The latest from Boston: the New England Patriots can't
dance. Reviewers of their performance at the
Superbowl victory rally were unanimous in suggesting
that the players, coaches, and the team's owner, Bob
Kraft, should stick to their day jobs.

Speaking of which, on Monday, the Rams had to announce
that the victory parade was cancelled.

What I want to know is, what happened to the
souvenirs? Someone must have a use for all those t-shirts.

George Bush continues to nominate candidates for important government
jobs who have truly remarkable records. One of the latest, Charles
Pickering, nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Quoth the Detroit Free Press:

As a Mississippi legislator, Pickering fought implementation of the
1965 Voting Rights Act, even co-sponsoring a resolution for its
repeal. He supported the notorious and secretive Mississippi
Sovereignty Commission, a state-funded agency established to oppose
integration efforts after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education
decision. The commission had close ties to the racist White Citizens
Council and spied on civil rights and labor activists.

As a District Court judge, Pickering consistently criticized and
opposed the one-person-one-vote doctrine and majority black voting
districts.

He wrote an article in the Mississippi Law Journal in 1959 calling for
legislation -- enacted shortly thereafter -- strengthening a
Mississippi law banning interracial marriages.

His career also is characterized by a relentless hostility toward
abortion rights, as well as the rights of habeas corpus and due
process.

That's George Bush --- defending American values. He's not like the
last occupant of the White House, that's for sure...

Monday, February 04, 2002

So, I'm going through the Superbowl ads. (There was
this distracting material between them which rather
captured my attention yesterday evening).

Let me see if I've figured out the Britney Spears
Pepsi spots.

These were period pieces with period jingles,
designed to look exactly like real Pepsi commercials
from the past fifty years or so, with Britney Spears'
perky, twenty-year-old self inserted seamlessly into
each one.

The message is to warn the public that Britney
doesn't age, like a vampire (and a particularly strong
one who can stand prolonged exposure to sunlight), and
should be approached with caution and garlic, or
preferably avoided entirely.

A while ago Jim Henley put a piece up on why he
is not a liberal. And while Jim apparently had the good taste to
buy off my banner ad, I still have trouble buying his argument --- or,
for that matter, this other
argument, to the same end, by Iain Murray.

(Update: Iain thinks I misunderstood him; he's not a libertarian, and his defense of them was meant to be qualified).

Here's the nub of Jim's piece, at least as I read it, discussing the
trouble with legal solutions to social problems:

Behind every law is a weapon. That goes for all the nice
regulatory laws too. Sure, it's only "civil proceedings," but try
telling them to tie a tail and a string to their civil proceedings and
run into a headwind and its the sherrifs and marshalls who come round
to uphold "the majesty of the law." Which ends up in the same place
the criminal law does - jail or, if you take the armed fugitive route,
death. "Contempt of Court" - dissing da judge - is the thing that
judges will lock you up for indefinitely, and on their own say-so, and
try checking and balancing that if you don't like it. They don't ask
you to go politely, either. It's sherrifs and marshalls time
again.

But you could say the exact same things about private contractual
arrangements. The covenant restrictions common in gated communities,
for instance, which restrict everything from the color of the house
paint to the choice of plants in the garden and the height of the
grass, are at least as restrictive as most towns' zoning ordinances.
Borland recently tried to impose software licenses which required you
to let its agents
access your computers to verify compliance with the license terms.
And anyone who thinks that government bureaucracies are
uniquely ill-mannered, obstructive, and incompetent, has
never gotten into a serious tussle
with an HMO.

Violate these private contractual arrangements, and where do you
wind up? Civil proceedings, in court. And, lest there be confusion,
enforcement of private contracts is sherrifs and marshalls
time even when the agreements in question are simply software
licenses.

Ah, the libertarians will reply, but you had the private
choice as to whether to enter into those private contractual
arrangements in the first place, and you don't have that choice with
respect to laws.

Really?

How many people are working with computers these days who
can really afford not to go anywhere near a Microsoft license
agreement?

And how much choice do any of us have about our listings
in the credit bureaus, à la Equifax? These are huge,
unaccountable bureaucracies, which keep tabs on just about everyone in
the United States. When they screw up, innocent people can find it
difficult, if not impossible, to buy a house or a car, to enroll at
schools, due to student loan difficulties, or even to get a
credit card (and have you tried to travel recently without one?).
Their databases are notoriously unreliable and insecure. Plain errors
can take months to
correct, even if the corrections don't get mysteriously undone
later when the source of the bogus data resubmits it. This sounds
like a libertarian horror story about intrusive government and
insensitive government bureaucracies, but it's entirely in the private
sector; government has nothing to do with it. And the finance
industry's lobbyists are paid princely sums to make sure that it stays
that way, and that the credit bureaus don't become subject to anything
like European privacy laws.

(Regarding privacy laws, by the way, libertopian fantasies
sometimes have private certification agencies serving this sort of
regulatory function. With regard to privacy, at least, there's a
cautionary tale available on the net --- TrustE, which was started as
an experiment in private-sector regulation by the folks at the EFF,
and has to be counted as an egregious
failure; all it does is certify that a site has a privacy
policy, and when major players like Microsoft and RealAudio have been
caught by others in flat violation of their stated security policies,
TrustE's response has generally been to help them
find ways to wriggle out of their difficulties, as it were, "on a technicality".
TrustE seems terminally mired in the fundamental conflict of interest
that comes from being funded by the very companies that it is supposed
to regulate).

Or consider health insurance. I've actually had libertarians try
to explain to me at great length that the problems with our health
care system stem from excessive regulation, and if government would
just get out of the way, the magic of the market would summon
insurance providers from the air, to suit every need and preference.
But one of the real problems with private insurance is that the
providers tend, whenever they can, to engage in "cherry-picking"
healthy clients. In a truly free market, why would anyone offer
health insurance at affordable rates to a forty-five year old with a
heart arhythmia and hereditary risk for brain cancer?

And, as I've noted
before, libertarians also seem not to recognize that a lot of the
regulatory structure we have was a response to massive private-sector
failures of the past.

So, that's what confuses me about libertarians. They seem to
combine a pathological fear of government power --- any use
of government power --- with a willful blindness towards abuses of
corporate power, and towards flaws in private sector "solutions", even
when those flaws stem from ineluctable conflicts of interest. In
fact, that's the nub of Iain Murray's argument
--- that the limited lifespan of monopolies in the marketplace makes
them less of a long-term threat than tyrannous governments. But I can
think of quite a few monopolies that were only broken up by government
action, and many that lasted longer than the average 20th-century
European military dictatorship. And no one believes the limited
lifespans of those dictatorships are somehow grounds for ignoring
their other abuses. Which were more severe than corporate abuse, to
be sure --- but that doesn't justify giving corporate abuse a free
pass.

Abuse of corporate power is real. It exists. There are solutions,
sometimes, in government. And while abusive governments also exist,
the Federal Trade Commission and the FDA don't look much like tyranny
to me, not even by Iain's definition, "the systematic deprivation of
protection from arbitrary rule". What that sounds like, to me, is
Equifax.

Laws are weapons, sure --- never doubt it. But I thought it was
the liberals who were supposed to be in favor blindly stripping people
of their weapons...

Sunday, February 03, 2002

Brian Linse points out
this
article by John Dean, comparing Cheney's stonewalling on Enron to
Nixon's on Watergate. But it seems Mr. Dean may be another
conservative (or so I gather from his service to Nixon) who's getting
disproportionately obsessed with Enron.

There are a couple of things about this piece that I found
disturbing. The first was the banner ad with the dancing monkey that
said "SHOCK THE MONKEY... with gorgeous FindLaw apparel!" But the ads
are in a rotation, so you, gentle reader, may be spared.

The second was this quote:

In fact, not since Richard Nixon stiffed the Congress
during Watergate has a White House so openly, and arrogantly, defied
Congress's investigative authority.

This is where Dean goes overboard. In fact, this very
administration has been more open and arrogant about defying
Congressional authority. For instance, they invoked executive
privilege to keep Congress from learning why the FBI let an
innocent man rot in jail for 30 years on a murder rap. (This
story just keeps getting worse, by the way; according to a recent 60
Minutes story on the case, the star witness at the trial was a mobster
who the FBI knew to be the real killer, and memos bluntly describing
the whole affair were sent directly to J. Edgar Hoover).

Still, Dean's piece is worth reading, for two things. One is to
learn how thin and insubstantial Cheney's legal arguments actually
are. The other is his discussion of the consequences for checks and
balances if the lawless Supreme Court majority that decided Bush
v. Gore chose again to side with the Bush administration...